[dead]
'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
301–310 of 361 posts
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#302Reading the comments here, it seems that even very prestigious universities are full of academic pettiness and dysfunction which deny all of us the output of brilliant people like Katalin Karikó. It leaves me wondering: why do we not create any new universities? Why doesn't a Carnegie of our age create a new university? Brin University? Zuck University? This seems like a no brainer. I think it might seem difficult to…
Azim Premji University? Wealthy people are definitely setting up universities except they are outside the US. The center of gravity of academia is shifting eastward imho.
Lagging indicators like patents per capita and Nobel prizes will also follow in a generation or so.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#303It'd be worth taking publicly available citation network data and developing a metric based on long term (say 25y) significance vs short term. Anyone who understands how to 'play the game' can make an impact over a 5-10y period, but people who actually change the game will stand out, as would their collaborators to a lesser extent.
I'm glad to see this article calling out the people who threw stumbling blocks in her way. They deserve any career damage they get.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#304My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…
I'm not in the same field, nor in the USA, but I've found the incentives usually work but there is a misunderstanding of the role of the professor.
All the professors I know have their teams pursuing multiple lines of work. Some are "safe" and some are more out there. A typical "safe" area is usually running some very expensive piece of equipment (like a mass spectrometer or something) b/c that automatically generates collaborations and gets your name on lots of papers. You need to mix and match and use the safer work to fund your more experimental ideas. They also basically never do too much research themselves. They will dip in and give suggestions and guidance and help out, but their primary role is to teach and act as a lab manager - directing students and postdocs to different areas of research. So in a way, if you're being a professor and personally deeply involved in the research, then you're "doing it wrong".
On a high level, at least from these popsci descriptions of her work, it kinda feels like Katalin Karikó was just not doing the professor role correctly? The fact she was working on this one problem (and seemingly nothing else?) is very surprising for a professor. Professors aren't just tenured post-docs. If you don't want to be a lab manager then I don't think being a professor is the job for you
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#305My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…
> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…
> Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants).
The EU does it better. At least with the old Horizon 2020 scheme, up to 20% of the grant amount could be set aside for overhead costs. Anything more would get flagged if the grant was ever audited.
This limited how much participating universities could repurpose. I don’t know how Horizon EU is set up, but my guess is that it follows the same approach.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow—you and I live in different university universes. The overheads are essential to running research universities. They are definitely not kickbacks. This is obvious when comparing research costs at national laboratories versus research costs for comparable work at most universities.
Overhead rates at pure research non-profits are much lower than at universities. The difference is the amount of bureaucracy.
This is not universally true. The last grant I had with a pure research non-profit, my state university had a markedly lower overhead rate, as well as far more flexibility in lowering it (if a sponsor pre-specifies a lower rate, we almost always accept that).
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#307My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…
> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…
"you may not buy non-instrumentation computers"
This will come as a shock to the three laptops, one desktop, one server and five cluster nodes I have purchased on various grants.
Also the "kickback" as you put it (aka indirect cost returns) vary wildly both between and within universities. For example, we get zero indirect cost returns, but do get money back for unallocated spending if we bring in a higher percentage of our salary than we are obligated to.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…
What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive. Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible)…
What amuses, and irritates, me is that industry frequently projects their own system onto academia.
They get incensed at the idea of overhead - but don't recognize that we're not legally allowed to have a profit margin.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume this is in part because the $150k startup hire can get fired just as fast if they don't impress, while the corresponding academia process takes months or years.
There's also inmediate feedback 150k salary ships, sells, or is out of a job or the company goes bankrupt, whichever is 1st The equvalent researcher, with almost all kinds of research, will always keep the same job for years, and the University is always going to be around regardless of the research being done
Given very few tenure-track faculty are making $150K, it's more like "A 85K salary has a ticking clock - and considers themselves lucky to have it - wherein if they don't meet some fairly steep performance goals, they are automatically fired."
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers. Or diverting funds from beautification projects. Or from the mass of consulting firms they hire for various things. There is now an average of only 2.5 faculty per administrator at universities and many of the better research universities have ratios closer to 1:1. Really, it's a que…
> Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers. Which administrators tho? There are about a dozen I rely on every day, and if you eliminate them, you'll be causing a lot more work for me, the researcher. Many admin positions are created after faculty complain their workload is getting too large. A lot of people seem to think the…
This - my university is actually a fairly lean organization that's continually pushed more and more administrative burden onto faculty.
A lot of people like hand waving and saying "Administrators", but like the idea that most regulations are written in blood, there are tangible reasons for most administrative positions. Even the admins I don't like and I think are a waste of space are that way because of them, and I can envision a useful person being in their place.